Brittany Herzberg (00:04.086)
Hello and welcome to the Basic Bee Podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO coach, Brittany Herzberg. How are we doing today? Whenever it is that you are listening to this, let's see. I'm recording this for the future. So by the time you hear this, the August SEO sprint will be well underway. We have a two-week sprint, so you're hearing this literally at the halfway point. I'm sure it's going well. I'm so excited already with who we have in the group and
really just how this whole offer is come to be and what it is now. And I'm really loving this version and really loving the groups that are coming together and just guiding people through SEO in a very doable, inspirational, fun, community based way. So yeah, I'm digging it. I hope you are having a fantastic day. I wanna talk to you really about what it takes to keep up with your SEO once you actually get it set up, because that's the whole thing that we're working through in all of the SEO sprints.
It's what I work through with any of my done for you clients when you come to me for a done for you website SEO. And this is a question that I get a lot, is like, what is it gonna take to keep this up? What is a monthly activity level for SEO for what's gonna be required for me? And I think it's really important to talk about this because so many people as business owners, we are just so programmed to think of marketing as email marketing or marketing as what you do on Instagram or social media marketing in general.
And that can feel like a lot. So then you're like, let me just add on SEO and stress myself out to the max. And actually it's the complete opposite because what you are used to with we're just gonna talk Instagram marketing. When you think about what's required of you for social media marketing or marketing on Instagram, it's a lot. It's a daily thing. You feel guilty taking the weekends off.
And then you come back on Monday and you're like, I have to update everybody on my life. I have to tell them what happened. I have to like go straight into content creation mode. What do I post about? What do I say? There's a lot of that that I hear from people that I even experience myself or have experienced in the past. Now I'm feeling much better about it, but I've been there and it's a very real feeling. So then you think about adding SEO on top of it. But here's the difference. SEO on a monthly basis is much, much, much more manageable.
Brittany Herzberg (02:21.204)
It's something that really can ebb and flow with you in whatever season of life that you're in. And it's really important that you have your website SEO set up first so that it can ebb and flow with you, so that it can work with you within your capacity every single month, every single season with stuff that is expected, like for example, having a baby or a move. And it can be there for you in seasons of very unexpected things like illnesses, injuries, you name it, all the bad things that are popping in your head right now. SEO is there for you.
And it is able to support you. And you have to start with the foundation on your website. So let me set the scene for you, shall I? Because this whole episode, I was like, I have got to talk about this. There I had a couple of really packed call days this week that I'm recording things. Specifically, I had two days where I was supposed to have three calls, back-to-back days, a Thursday and a Friday. Thankfully, one of the calls needed to be rescheduled on one of the days.
I was like, this is great. I can get so much stuff done. And that's when this idea like popped into my head and I was like, I have to talk about this. In one of the calls, I was speaking in a friend's photography marketing membership group, Dolly DeLong. She is amazing. She has a great group. I will link the group below. And when I was thinking about the topic of what I wanted to talk to the group about, I was like, Dolly, what's what's going on? What are people saying? Are there conversations that are being had? Are people keeping up with because I'm in
her membership for a full year and every month I meet and speak with these people. So we've gone through finding your North Star. Like I've literally taken them through the SEO and grow method. It's beautiful. It's so meta and I love it. So we found their North stars. We've done keyboard research. We have taken the time to optimize their core website pages for SEO with an effective SEO strategy. And now they're on to things like optimizing their social media profiles and creating optimized content. So I'm like
Let's touch base. How are we feeling? What's going on? What are you hearing? And what she was sharing and what I have also heard with so many business owners. And again, this has come up even in DMs and emails, which is why we're talking about it today the podcast. Is, you know, I'm not seeing the inquiries that I want. I'm not seeing the traffic to my website that I want. And this comes up so often. And I always, always go back to these two questions. So I want to walk you through this process because it's really a three-step review, basically.
Brittany Herzberg (04:46.21)
That you can take yourself through it when you're thinking, I don't know why I'm not getting more inquiries. I don't know why I'm not seeing the traffic to my website. This is a wall that we all bump up against. So this is like a really quick check-in that you can give yourself. So step one is going to be checking in to see if if you have actually implemented a solid website SEO strategy. Have you done that? For your pages that are in the navigation menu, for the pages that are in your footer, for pages that you send people to frequently that may not live in one of those two places.
For example, if you have a checklist or some other kind of freebie or a private podcast that maybe isn't linked in those two places, have pages like that been optimized as well. So that's thing number one that you really need to assess. Have I done it? When did I last do it? Have my offers changed? Has my audience changed? Have any of the answers to those three questions that make up your North Star have those answers changed? And if they have,
Then you definitely want to go back to those SEO strategies and judge them so that they really fit what you're doing now. If you answer that question and you're like, yes, I recently updated them and or I feel good about what they are, the next thing that you want to ask yourself is, have I been blogging? When was the last time I blogged? How frequently am I blogging? Are my blogs very clearly, obviously tied to the keywords that I found for my core website pages?
That I built my SEO strategies for those pages around. Again, another way to say that is: are they really clearly speaking to and calling in the ideal clients? Are they really clearly speaking to what I do for people, the offers that I have, the offers that I want to fill? If not, that's something that you really want to explore because you need both an effectively optimized website for SEO and the content that you're publishing regularly that is also optimized for SEO.
You need both in order to get the results that we all want, which is, of course, more and aligned leads and opportunities, knocking on our digital door with much less effort from all of us. Cause we want our time back. We want to be able to live life. We want to be able to not feel like we have to document every trip to the pool or to go get ice cream or to go get pizza. We just want to exist. And you can do that, but these are the two steps that you need to to walk through.
Brittany Herzberg (07:04.928)
Is my website SEO done? Is it done well? Do I feel good about it? Has anything changed? And if it has, take the time to go back and optimize those pieces and then check in with your blogging. So am I blogging regularly? And that could look anywhere from, I think I shared a reel about this this week, one 500-ish word blog post a month all the way up to you could blog once or twice a week. So that could be anywhere from what would that be, four to eight blogs a month. So anywhere in that neighborhood of one to eight blogs a month.
And I will tell you this, I'm going to be so honest with you. If you're really wanting to get more traffic to your website, if you're really wanting to get your name out there, if you're really wanting to bump up with the potential leads that are coming in the door, and you're not seeing stuff with what you have so far, you're going to want to increase the frequency of blogging that you're doing. So if you are at one blog a month, kick it up a notch. You could take that up to two blogs a month or four blogs a month. And that doesn't have to be
Done in real time on each week, it could be, but again, this is where SEO gets to meet you where you're at. So if you have a really good batching workflow that you walk through, I know some friends are just so phenomenal with the batching. I am not. But if that is you, crank out all the blog posts, get all of the copy out, optimize it for SEO, draft them in your website, and then publish them. And you could do that all in the same day. Or you could choose to drip them out if you want to. But
I mean, if you have it, it's totally okay if you want to just publish everything. But that's something that you really need to be honest with yourself about is am I blogging? Am I sharing this stuff? Is it actually optimized? Do I feel confident about the way that I'm optimizing these things? And if not, there's resources, there's tools, there's programs, there's people. You have stuff available to you. You may not feel great. It may make you feel a little like meh about stuff, but you do have resources and tools and people and programs and things.
So in my world, if you're in my world and you're thinking about content, I have the blogging workshop that'll walk you through exactly what you need to do to optimize your blog posts for SEO. I have the podcast SEO workshop that'll take you through exactly what you need to do for your podcast SEO. And if you're more in the space of I need to optimize my website, I haven't done a great job or I want to revisit that. I want to refine it. I want to make sure it's a really solid SEO strategy that's on my website, join the next SEO sprint.
Brittany Herzberg (09:27.64)
The next one that I have coming up is in October. It's early October. That's gonna still be the two week SEO sprint. And then in early December, I'm already going to start talking about this because weirdly we're in the like very second half of this year, which I can't even believe I'm saying. But in early December, I'm going to run a five day version of the SEO sprint. Cause I know there are so many of us where we spent the entire year focused on everybody else except our own businesses. And this funny thing happens in December where people are like, yeah, I have a business. I should do stuff for my business.
Or maybe you have like your tax person who's like, you have some money that you need to spend on yourself for your own business stuff. And you're like, sweet, what do I do? You could join us for that sprint. So two-week sprint in October, five-day sprint in December. Those are the two that are coming up. You can always opt for an asynchronous SEO sprint. You could also opt for done-for-you website SEO. All of the links to all of the things are gonna be below. But you really want to be starting with website SEO, getting that plugged in.
spending some time to make sure that you're again being honest with yourself with what your North Star is, building your SEO strategies with those answers in mind, and then going on to part two, which is optimizing things like your social media profiles, podcast guessing materials, and creating that optimized content like blogs or podcasts regularly. And then the final, final step, which is to really boost your visibility and start tracking your metrics and make aligned marketing moves based on that information.
Things like I'm going to create this many blog posts. I'm going to talk about these things on my podcast. Maybe you're even going to like I have a couple of clients right now where we've had so many conversations about you're ranking for things, but you're not ranking for your things. You're ranking for stuff that you're having guests come on your podcast and talk about. And while we love people and we love having people on the shows and getting to shout out our friends and things like that, we need to be highlighting our expertise. We need to be centering keywords that are great for us so that we can be found.
So those are some things you get to, you know, look at the metrics, look at the data, data over drama, I love that phrase, but you get to look at the data and really parse out, okay, this is what's happening. These are the steps I need to take to get to this version of things, which is what I really want. And then you have your game plan and you just follow the game plan. So in case you didn't catch it, I just walked you through the entire SEO and grow method, website SEO, then off site and SEO for content and then visibility and metrics tracking. That is the process, that is the journey.
Brittany Herzberg (11:53.976)
That I have seen lead to such success for people. And I've seen it lead to success for some people quite quickly. One of the coolest examples of this that I can share with you is my website designer and brand strategist friend Jenna. She actually did all of my website stuff. She went through my SEO and Grow program. And now she's got people coming in from Google, additional like one to two inquiries every single month.
Because she has a solid SEO foundation for her core website pages. And on top of that, she's blogging in a very, very sustainable way, at least one post a month. She's a mom, she's married, she has a business, and she's also a whole human outside of all those things, too. So it's been really beautiful to watch people have all of the success. I know it's available for you. It's on you to take action with it. And I have tools, I have all of this knowledge chucked inside my brain.
I have lots of different ways to access me. So I'm here. Even if you're like, I don't know where to start, just send a message. And it's really wild. The maintenance portion of SEO is so much more doable and useful than you can even imagine right now because so many of us are just so in, like I said at the beginning of this, in that mindset of social media marketing and with SEO marketing, it completely flips it on its head. So if you have a life thing come up.
Guess what? You still have website pages and blog posts and podcast episodes that are out there marketing for you that you pumped out months or years ago. It's a really beautiful thing. And I just want you to be able to experience this. So find me on Instagram with any questions. Of course, you can text the show if you're listening to this on or even reading the transcript on the blog page. You can of course leave a comment below. And as always, please remember that I'm over here cheering you on on your SEO journey.
